Many thanks to my transcriber!

Announcer:  Now you may know actress Kate Mulgrew from the T.V. series Star Trek: Voyager.  She played Captain Kathryn Janeway for seven years. But now she is taking on a different role, Off Broadway, in a play about the life of Katharine Hepburn.  It’s called “Tea atFive” and theater critic Michael Bracken spoke with Mulgrew recently, and talked, among other things, about the similarities between the two characters, Hepburn and Captain Janeway.

Kate Mulgrew:  One is an American icon, certainly extraordinary in her very maverick approach to what was in the nineteen thirties in Hollywood an almost unbreakable system. Hepburn put on her trousers and strode into the boys club and broke down the door.  Imagine. Thirty-one years old. RKO offers her as a… a leading role “Mother Carey’s Chickens”. This is what she’s looking at after a string of extraordinary successes or I shall say marvelous films.“Bringing Up Baby”.  “Holiday”.  She took one look at the contract and she ripped it up. Bought herself out.  You don’t do that.  You don’t do that today.  You didn’t do that then. That’s… boys playing… in the big time.

Kathryn Janeway is, of course, captain of a star ship.  So their similarities are their courage.  I like to call it grit.  Certainly grit in Hepburn’s case.  She was defined by her guts.  And they’re Yankee guts.  And those Yankee guts came from a confidence that was instilled in her by two remarkable people – her parents.

Michael Bracken:  How about your own family.  I know you came from a big family.  I did a little research, looked at the websites.  It seems to me that there were some parallels.  I don’t want to be so bold as to go too far with it.  Why don’t you talk about it a little.

Kate Mulgrew:  No.  I think you’re being astute.  Parallels are as follows. She was one of six children. The oldest girl, second oldest child.  Same with me, only I’m one of eight. She lost her brother when she was fourteen. I lost two sisters.  And I would say the loss of my… certainly my sister Tessie, when I was eighteen, defined me.  People who have had early blows are likely to mature rather quickly.  And they are elevated to a status that is not usually given, or assigned to young girls before it is naturally appropriate. So we were old before our time, to make a long story short, and in the case of Katharine Hepburn, she was not expected to be just an actress, she was expected, I think, to be a great one.

Michael Bracken: Even just sitting here talking to you – your voice… you start reminding me Katharine Hepburn.  I don’t know if that was already there or if that’s something that’s come on in the course of doing the part, but certainly it is there and I hope the people can hear that at home as well.

Kate Mulgrew:  I don’t know how to explain it.  I think it’s alchemy.  It’s a marriage, it’s a love affair – whatever you want to call it. But I know that I have it with this particular character.

Michael Bracken:  Talk about the difference between the grueling eighteen hour days you worked on the series and now shifting gears to a live performance every night.

Kate Mulgrew:  It’s very different.  Film acting is far more immediate.  You don’t have to have the whole in your mind.  Your preparation is not all day to go into the night.  Your work is constant and you’re doing take after take after take so it’s kind of an immediacy.  Get it, throw it away, next. Get it, throw it away. And at night going home and studying for the next day. It’s very grueling. This is a different life.  It’s lonelier and it’s deeper, and the whole day is about the night. My whole day goes to this performance at night.  I would say my whole life shifts for it.  So would I be wrong to say that it’s more total experience?  It’s live.  I’m in front of people.  A camera – sweet charming as it is, is a clinical thing, right? The audience is right there.